Traditional printer technology prints images in an image domain, either color or monochrome. In addition, prior art methods include effects applied to paper to make images on paper more interesting. For example, some images are embossed so that people can touch and feel them, which might be referred to as the tactile domain. Some images have buttons behind them so that a music or a song will play if the buttons are activated, which may be referred to as the auditory domain. Some images will have perfume smell such as a cosmetic catalog to attract consumers, which we refer to herein as the aroma domain. U.S. Pat. No. 5,975,675 describes a printer that can spray perfume onto paper in addition to printing text characters and images. As described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,975,675 the type of perfume is pre-selected or user-input. The disclosure of this patent is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
Another U.S. Pat. No. 5,995,770, describes a system to allow a user to pre-select an applicable scent which is to be applied to an image. Then at the photofinishing site the scent can be delivered to a print, or a set of prints along with an image. The disclosure of this patent is incorporated by reference herein in its entirety.
A limitation common to these prior art patents is that the scent is pre-selected and the region of the print where the scent is applied is pre-determined as well. The technology that the prior art describes is useful for mass printing of identical brochures or catalogs for advertising.
Therefore, there is a need to design a printing technology which will intelligently detect the image content and will print either the image alone or the image together with a selected scent applied to the image receiver.